9 Ways Tanium Gives You Control of Your Endpoint Software Environment

Endpoint Management lets IT teams manage any endpoint environment from a single control point.

But organizations often struggle to keep the software on their endpoints up to date with the latest patches and applications.

The result — stale systems prone to failure from compatibility issues, security vulnerabilities and breaches. And it doesn’t take long for a known vulnerability to be exploited — less than 24 hours, according to the NSA.

In this blog, we explain the failures of traditional software management tools. We describe how Tanium can give you better visibility into your software environment and more control over software versions, licenses and usage across endpoints.

Most software management tools can’t do the job

If software management over an expansive endpoint environment were easy, 80 percent of IT leaders wouldn’t find that critical updates they believed had been deployed had, in fact, not been successfully completed on all their devices.

And, more alarming, if the available tools were effective, 81 percent of CIOs and CISOs wouldn’t feel it necessary to refrain from making an important security update or patch because of the negative impact it might have on business operations.

Traditional software management tools struggle to tell you the state of your environment with any accuracy, often with little visibility into software versions, licenses, and usage. And that’s because they all share three inherent flaws in their approach.

Traditional tools lack visibility into the endpoint and software environment. Often, they fail to identify endpoints and can’t accurately identify the software on each of them or to provide real-time information on the software they do find.

Traditional tools struggle to distribute software across large volumes of endpoints. They require substantial time to distribute operating system and application updates and often create network disruption, performance loss and the very real likelihood of end-user downtime.

Traditional tools require a substantial investment in servers and other infrastructure. They typically depend on legacy architecture designed for a much smaller, more centralized and homogeneous environment. Scaling can be achieved only by deploying and managing additional hardware.

9 ways Tanium dramatically improves how organizations can manage their software

Tanium offers a much more efficient approach to software management. The Tanium Platform offers a modern, lightweight, distributed architecture that can carry out a continuous assessment of your endpoint environment and rapid application of new software updates — without creating outages, strain or performance degradation.

Tanium provides real-time visibility into the software installed within your endpoint environment and a comprehensive suite of controls. This gives you remote management of the software you find — all from a unified platform that leverages a single agent and console.

No matter the size or complexity of your digital environment, Tanium allows your IT team to:

1. Deploy software faster and more efficiently

Deploy new updates and installations across your environment in hours — not days, weeks or months. Reduce the burden on IT and spend less time creating and installing software updates and managing infrastructure.

2. Scan endpoints with minimal impact

Continuously scan your digital infrastructure with real-time speed regardless of network size. Manage hundreds to millions of endpoints without straining network resources. Continuously see where software is installed, out-of-date, and being used across your environment.

Tanium makes it easy to continuously scan your endpoints

3. Reduce network infrastructure

Replace hundreds or even thousands of servers with a single distributed instance.

4. Increase percentage of software visibility

Develop a clear picture of the software installed and used in your environment and their versions.

Tanium gives you a summary of installed software packages

5. Decrease mean-time-to-deploy

Deploy software updates faster and reduce the window for vulnerabilities in your environment.

6. Optimize ratio of self-service to IT-driven software installs

Build a healthy balance that reduces strain on IT without losing control over software installations.

7. Perform quick and accurate assessments

Ask questions about the software installed on your endpoints and receive real-time answers.

8. Automate software updates and management

Install updates as soon as they become available — automatically or with one click.

9. Deploy updates at any time and scale without fear

Distribute updates among endpoints at the LAN level to reduce network impact.

Four simple steps to better software management

Tanium delivers software management capabilities that increase in effectiveness the longer you use our platform. You’ll be able to customize its functionality to suit the unique requirements of your digital environment. And you can create automated workflows that reduce the effort to run your processes.

Here are four steps for improving your software management:

STEP 1: Identify unknown endpoints and software that has not been evaluated or brought under control by your management tools. Tanium typically finds 10-20 percent more managed and unmanaged endpoints than our clients knew they had.

STEP 2: Find issues by comparing installations and versions of each piece of software, for each endpoint, against defined software bundles and the most up-to-date versions available. Tanium often pinpoints hundreds or thousands of missing patches — some from years ago.

STEP 3: Standardize your environment by rapidly applying updates to out-of-date installations. Then install software missing from endpoints that require them. Tanium can apply software updates and installations to an enterprise endpoint environment in hours, without causing network strain or risking downtime.

STEP 4: Tanium allows automation of many aspects of software management and further reduces IT burden by governing end-user self-service.

Tanium Software Management is part of our comprehensive and revolutionary endpoint management and security platform

The Tanium Platform provides a modular suite of services that can be adopted to fit the unique needs of your organization. Our platform capabilities can fill gaps within an organization’s existing software management processes or give them a comprehensive endpoint management platform for developing centralized control and lowering operational silos.

Role-based access allows users from multiple groups to safely use the solution simultaneously and deliver benefits throughout your organization.

IT operations

Keep endpoints running with standardized versions of software they need while reducing person-hours devoted to management.

Leadership and management

Gain comprehensive visibility into software in your environment and eliminate unnecessary spend on unused software licenses.

IT security

Resolve vulnerabilities from old software, missing patches and software misconfiguration, increasing the barrier to entry into your network.

Tanium reduces enterprise-wide security risk and the potential for operational downtime while simplifying your environment and eliminating overhead.

Tanium is built to address today’s challenges

Tanium can deliver fundamental, holistic and effective software management for the most demanding and complex networks.

Our out-of-the-box services, modules and workflows provide the tools needed to gain more complete, context-driven visibility over your IT operations.

Learn more about the Tanium Software Management solution and request a demo.

You can also check out my other blog post, Is It Time to Revisit Your Software Management Practices?